featured blog posts

The Educational Achievement Authority is an experiment that has failed. Legislators are considering a bill to expand it from its current 15-school version in Detroit to a statewide district that takes over the "bottom 5 percent" of schools. This system must be abolished completely, certainly not expanded statewide.

I vehemently believe that Detroit is a place and time where we can come together to design our collective outcomes. It is indeed the opportunity of a generation and it will take everyone, incoming and resident, black and white, young and old to harness it.

This year, in an unprecedented shift away from transparency, the General Government budget legislation allots two bulk sums of money, totaling nearly $240 million, to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. I believe this is bad governance.

Detroit under the helm of an Emergency Manager may bring back a public bus system and city lights, but what about some of the other things on the table, like Detroit's democracy and sovereignty? When you give something up, sometimes it never returns to the table.

Liberal arguments for Emergency Managers are not based on any real principle. They're little more than concessions to present state and national political trends, where austerity rules and Wall Street always wins

Kwame Kilpatrick's conviction might feel like the end of a chapter, but there's many more stories to follow. Despite Detroit's own precarious future, we see evidence every day that people, and cities, can change for the better.

Crime continues to be Detroit's number one issue. It is on the mind of every citizen. We will not thrive until the perception of Detroit is changed to that of a safe city through reducing the number of crime victims.

While full of possibility and enormous opportunity for growth and renewal, Detroit's future remains tenuous. Our civic leaders must urgently confront the deep historical challenges that are engulfing us today with three essential tasks.